Laparoscopic surgery is a common and popular alternative to open surgery due to the considerable reduction of recovery time, pain and complications. However, many obstacles make the surgeon's work difficult and inefficient, including limited access to the operating field, indirect vision, and operating theaters originally built for open surgery. There has been an interest in the field to develop systems to aid in “operating room awareness.” Operating room awareness refers to creating an operating room that can collect data related to the operation in progress and use the data to assist the surgeon and medical staff. There is also interest using the collected data to assist in surgeon/staff training and evaluation.
One component of operating room awareness is tool identification, location and navigation. Historically, surgical tools have been identified using visual inspection by the surgeon and/or medical staff. Some automated systems exist; however, the accuracy of these systems can be compromised by the presence of metals and fluids in the operating space and the reliance on a constantly-changing point of reference for the tracking device.
Therefore, a need in the art exists for a minimally intrusive, yet robust, system to analyze data generated during a medical procedure and provide real-time context awareness to the surgery team as well as post-procedure evaluation tools.